From homonationalism to shame in the Israeli documentary Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life

ABSTRACT

This article explores the role of the affective experience of shame in Tomer Heymann’s documentary Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life (2018) about internationally successful Israeli gay porn star Jonathan Agassi. It argues that by emphasizing shame as constitutive of Agassi’s queer identity, the film subverts the hypermasculine, Israeli, militarized image of his star persona. The film thus refuses to support the conservative trend of Israel’s LGBT community that aims to remove stigmas from gay identities within a logic of homonormative and homonational sexual politics of ‘pride.’ In this film, shame becomes a refuge, a site of solidarity and belonging for Agassi as well as for Heymann, the filmmaker. Both resist mainstream Israeli gay politics and refuse to adopt the sexual and national identity that this normative logic demands. The question of queer identity in the film is organized around the formative experience of shame and based on the relation to others. Thus, the film, in effect, produces a queer sociability and ethics in shame.

KEYWORDS:

• Shame
• Israeli documentary
• homonationalism
• queer performativity
• gay pornography

Introduction

Tomer Heymann’s documentary Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life (2018) depicts the life of the internationally successful Israeli gay porn star Jonathan Agassi. Agassi was born in Brooklyn, New York, as Jonathan Langer. When he was six months old, his parents divorced, and his father left for Berlin where he started a new family, leaving Agassi and his siblings to be raised by their mother in the Israeli suburb of Holon. In 2009, the Jewish Russian-born American-Israeli porn actor and filmmaker Michael Lucas announced the launch of Men of Israel – the first gay pornographic film shot entirely on location in Israel with an all-Israeli cast. Agassi auditioned for the film and starred in two scenes. The film garnered significant commercial success and publicity, and Agassi was signed by Manhattan-based Lucas Entertainment as an exclusive model, continuing to star in a long list of films such as Inside Israel (2009), Trapped in the Game (2010), Urine Fist Fest (2011), Urine Ibiza (2012), Sexteriors (2013), and Raw Double Penetration (2014). Agassi quickly rose to prominence, becoming extremely popular among gay porn consumers, and in 2011 received the Best Porn Performer award, appearing in several gay magazines as well as in mainstream media in both Israel and North America (Goldstein and Rainey 2009). In Heymann’s film, Lucas comments on Agassi: ‘He was bringing new elements of performance to every scene. He would never been doing the same routine. That is why people want to see him again and again.’

However, Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life presents not only Agassi’s successful porn career but also his childhood traumas; his life in Berlin as a male escort and performer in live sex shows; his addiction to hard drugs; his problematic relationship with his estranged father; the complex relationship with his brother and sister; and his special closeness to his mother. This article argues that the film emphasizes shame as constitutive of Agassi’s queer identity and thus subverts the hypermasculine militarized image of his star persona which coincides with a homonormative and homonational sexual politics of ‘pride.’ In its place, Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life produces a queer sociability and ethics in shame.

It is Agassi himself who makes the statement ‘Jonathan Agassi saved my life,’ referring to the sexual abuse and humiliation-shame he experienced as a queer boy by his father and schoolmates. ‘Jonathan Agassi’ – his gay pornographic star persona – is the one who saved Jonathan Langer, the shy and rejected sissy boy. As Agassi himself states, ‘He [Jonathan Agassi] is a character that takes over me whenever I need help. And he is always on my side.’

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1993) describes the queer subject as one whose identity is delineated by the formative experience of shame. She argues that appropriating the term ‘queer,’ which originates in a derogatory term for sexual and gender deviance, does not mean that the term can be ‘redeemed’ from its associations with shame and stigma; rather, it is attached to the childhood scene of shame as a source of transformational energy. Sedgwick defines the phrase ‘shame on you’ as a performative utterance because it is able to transform its addressee into a shamed subject. The queer subject is therefore one on whom shame was cast, and it constituted his/her identity. But although shame is an affect that constructs the self, its qualities are not fixed. While shame cannot be simply shaken off, it can be available for the work of metamorphosis – for example, into theatrical performance. Sedgwick proposes the term ‘queer performativity’ as ‘a name of a strategy for the production of meaning and being, in relation to the affect shame and to the later and related fact of stigma’ (11).

In this article, I would like to explore role of the affective experience of shame in Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life. The film’s turn to shame should be understood within the context of the mainstream sexual politics of the LGBT community in Israel. Since the 1990s, the political struggles of Israel’s LGBT community have focused solely on issues of direct concern to members of the community: homophobia, equal rights, and discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation (Ziv 2010). The official institutions of the LGBT community never took part in the struggles of other groups and attempted to project to the straight society a ‘natural’ and ‘apolitical’ image of respectable and educated Jewish gay men and women, professionally employed, who have served in the army, live in long-term relationships, and raise children, thus leading a life that resembles the dominant heterosexual model. Two of the most prominent issues of the LGBT community’s agenda – abolishing discrimination against gays in IDF (Israel Defense Force) and the right for same-sex parenthood and especially motherhood – reflect a longing for normalcy and assimilation into straight society (Gross 2000; Kadish 2005). In other words, in its struggle to broaden the civil rights of its members, the LGBT community did not challenge the Israeli citizenship regime and the boundaries of the national collective. On the contrary, it has fought to prove that its members are interested and willing to fulfill the traditional roles that Zionism has delineated for Jewish men and women, and therefore deem them worthy of being included in the national consensus.

These trends are closely linked to the strengthening of the homonormative and homonational sexual politics of the LGBT community in Israel (Gross 2015). According to Lisa Duggan (2003), homonormativity is a ‘new neoliberal sexual politics […] that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption’ (50). Following Duggan, Jasbir Puar (2007) describes homonationality as ‘national homonormativity,’ in which domesticized homosexual bodies serve as ammunition for strengthening the national project. Puar has explored the convivial relation between queerness and normative nationalism at a time in which liberal queer and gay rights have emerged within ‘the bountiful market and the interstices of state benevolence’ (xxvii). She writes: ‘homonationalism is fundamentally a critique of how lesbian and gay liberal rights discourses produce narratives of progress and modernity that continue to accord some populations access to cultural and legal forms of citizenship at that expense of the partial and full expulsion from those rights of other populations’ (25).

Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life subverts the hypermasculine, Israeli, militarized image of its star persona. The film thus refuses to support the conservative trend of Israel’s LGBT community that aims to remove stigmas from gay identities within a logic of homonormative and homonational sexual politics of ‘pride.’ The film emphasizes shame as constitutive of Agassi’s queer identity, and, moreover, it is shame that becomes a refuge, a site of solidarity and belonging for Agassi as well as for Heymann, the filmmaker.

Many of Heymann’s films and television series can be categorized as ‘first-person documentaries’ that place at their center the filmmaker – his/her own life, memories, family, and interaction with his/her surrounding (Hirsh 2020). These documentaries may take various forms such as diaries, autobiographies, and family portraits. They serve as an artistic strategy for the affirmation of the filmmaker’s self in front of the family and society and for the construction of identity. Often, they portray the relationships of the filmmaker with social institutions, thus intertwining the personal with the political.¹ Catherine Russell (1999) defines these films as ethnographic or autoethnographic:

[a]utobiography becomes ethnographic at the point where the film – or videomaker understands his or her personal history to be implicated in larger social formations and historical processes. Identity is no longer a transcendental or essential self that is revealed, but a ‘staging of subjectivity’ – a representation of the self as a performance. (276)

Most of Heymann’s documentaries mix a first-person narrative with a cultural-ethnographic analysis, self-representation with socio-political critique. For instance, It Kinda Scares Me (2001) investigates, in documentary diary style, Heymann’s coming out as a gay man while working as a youth instructor to a group of teenage boys in a peripheral Israeli town. Together they direct a stage play and discuss issues of violence, social alienation and sexual identity; the TV series and the film The Way Home (2009) and The Queen Has No Crown (2011) explore the director’s relationship with his mother and four siblings, using old 8 mm home-movies that document significant events in the family’s life and reflect on the loss of home and the political crises that have taken place in Israeli society; I Shot My Love (2010) depicts Heymann’s relationship with his German partner, raising unresolved familial and social conflicts between Israel and Germany. Heymann often appears on-screen himself also in films that do not directly engage with his own life, as in the TV series and film Paper Dolls (2004; 2006) that follows six work immigrants from the Philippines who are employed as private nurses to elderly populations and are also members of a drag queen group that performs in Tel Aviv.

Contrary to his first-person documentaries, Heymann’s voice is barley heard throughout Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life, except for few and very short instances, and it is Agassi’s voice that dominates the diegetic space. Heymann appears on-screen in one episode only, toward the film’s end, in which he reaches out to help Agassi who has collapsed after consuming drugs. It is Agassi himself who initiates the meetings with those close to him (for example, his father) and even films some of the events (for instance, his sexual encounters with his escort clients). He also records personal confessions to the camera as well as a video blog for his fans.²

I argue that shame not only subverts homonormative and homonational sexual politics of ‘pride,’ but also serves as a site of solidarity between Agassi and Heymann, who had exposed his own gay shame in a series of earlier films. Both resist mainstream Israeli gay politics and refuse to adopt the sexual and national identity that this normative logic demands. The question of queer identity in the film is organized around the formative experience of shame and based on the relation to others. Shame is presented as connectedness to others where all are fallen and all are shamed. Thus, the film, in effect, produces a queer sociability and ethics in shame.

Gay porn and homonationalim

Heymann’s film opens with a shot of Agassi sitting in front of the camera, shirtless, exposing a tanned, muscular, and tattooed male body. He seems excited and perhaps even slightly embarrassed in his new status as an up-and-coming international porn star, as he addresses his fans on Queer PornNation: ‘Thank you for being my fans. I’m happy to satisfy you in any chance that I can. As you know, I love sex. I love shooting porn. I wish myself to do it for many years, so you will have the best jerk off ever.’ In the next shot, Agassi is followed by the camera, loud techno music and flashing lights in the background, into the backstage of a live sex show (produced by Lucas Entertainment) in a gay nightclub in Berlin. The show’s director instructs the actors: ‘We are building a fantasy. It’s not a show, it’s a porn movie on stage, it’s like a theater.’ On the stage, the actors play the role of working-class straight men who work in an auto repair shop, on their lunch break. After eating the sandwiches made by their ‘wives,’ they kiss, take off their work overalls, expose muscular bodies and erect penises, and Agassi, on all fours, is penetrated from behind by a dildo after which he raises his legs in the air and engages in anal sex with his partner. The following morning, Agassi walks the Berlin streets, gracefully winking and sending air kisses to his gay fans that pine after him from across the street. He goes to his friend Christo’s apartment who takes nude pictures of him posing in several classic Greek masculine forms.

These scenes demonstrate the identity that Agassi has constructed for himself as a gay porn star that combines celebrity status, sexual spectacle, narcissism, exhibitionism, and hypermasculinity. The film emphasizes and exposes the work invested in producing the image of Agassi’s gay porn stardom. This notion is exemplified in many shots in which Agassi is seen applying makeup and taking time to carefully select his outfits in front of a mirror, as well as in makeover montages – in which Agassi appears in a series of stereotypical male images wearing a fur coat, leather clothes, and a suit during a photoshoot in Milan – signifying the transformation that he has undergone from being Jonathan Langer to Jonathan Agassi. Agassi’s theatrical hypermasculinity is also noticeable in a scene where he arrives, fashionably late, adorning a Roman gladiator outfit at the HustlaBall club in Berlin to receive the award for Best Porn Performer. In the international gay porn gladiator arena, Agassi has emerged as victorious.

Agassi’s performance of gay masculinity is also imagined in the film in national terms. During one of the scenes that take place at a gay club in Tel Aviv, a live sex show is filmed whose central theme is Israel, and especially its army. The director of the show addresses the non-local porn actors as follows: ‘All of my friends from out of Israel […] think Israelis are always in the army, macho, always butch. It’s a fantasy.' The muscular actors wear army uniforms, bullet-proof vests, armed with plastic weapons, their faces painted with camouflage paints, as they lead Agassi, with the crowd cheering in the background, on a stretcher to the center of the stage where they have sex.

Indeed, many gay pornographic films made in Israel follow a logic of homonormative and homonational sexual politics. They attempt to establish Israel as a Middle Eastern sexual utopia that offers its viewers an Oriental ‘rawness’ (exotic and rough, macho men, wild beaches, deserts and ancient archaeological sites) as well as a gay Western neoliberal lifestyle that takes place mostly in the urban and tolerant city of Tel Aviv – ‘the world’s best gay city' – with its modern skyscrapers, on whose balconies or with them in the background, the actors in some of the episodes are filmed having sex (Hagin and Yosef 2022). On The Men of Israel website, Lucas explains that the film is a ‘groundbreaking event,’ and ‘a landmark in the history of Israel and in the evolution of adult entertainment,’ with two aims: to represent Israel’s ‘sexually arousing’ and ‘tanned and chiseled muscle hunks’ for whom ‘it came naturally to perform with such raw sexual passionate [sic],’ and also allow Israel to ‘play a lead visual character as a country with rich history and a wide range of natural beauty’.³ The text promises us that ‘Israel has a number of sites and destinations to lure any tourist to book a flight.’ Lucas hopes that through the film’s dual adulation of the raw and untamed beauty and attractiveness of the men ‘in their remarkable natural environment’ and for Israel itself – which not only offers an Orientalist fantasy of wild male passionate rawness, but also, as he claims, ‘a truly progressive, multicultural society’ – he will be able to parlay the film’s success into the thriving of tourism in Israel as the Eastern European gay pornography company Bel Ami did for that region.

Every locale and everyone in the gay pornographic films made in Israel are part of a Western, liberal lifestyle. No matter how ‘ancient’ or ‘natural’ the land, Israel’s multicultural progressiveness is never once questioned. Israel’s landscapes, carefully selected and deliberately engineered for foreign viewers, are a mélange of an Orientalist paradise for tourism and a safe progressive Western haven in the Middle East. The porn film Too Hot in Tel Aviv (Roee Raz, 2007), for example, includes a guest appearance by Lucas, in a mise-en-abyme of sorts, presented in his full name and portraying a Western tourist who documents the ancient alleys of Jaffa with his camera, until he notices a nameless Israeli soldier in uniform with whom he has sex. In the film Inside Israel, Agassi plays a local tourist guide who exposes Western tourists to the exotic sites of Israel where they can freely engage in safe and shameless gay sex. Modernization and a gay neoliberal Western lifestyle take place not only in Tel Aviv but throughout the whole of Israel, since these films show no trace of non-Western cultures; there is no reminder of Palestinian or traditional Jewish lifestyle that might possess different sexual mores; and particularly, there is no mention whatsoever of homophobia or the difficulties of coming out. In Too Hot in Tel Aviv, for example, Yossi comes out of the closet to Elad, his straight Tel Aviv flat mate, at the very beginning of the film, after which they have sex and eventually also a romantic partnership; the film My Israeli Platoon (Roee Raz, 2009) is both coming-of-age and coming out story of an Israeli gay youth who recounts his sexual adventures in the IDF, presented as a tolerant and progressive army. A representation of the IDF appears also in The Men of Israel in a scene where Agassi, wearing army trousers and a dog tag, watches the sexual acts of two men from above, to which he masturbates. Agassi’s presence in the scene marks the role of the Israeli army in defending (gay) Israeli civilians (Evangelo 2015). The prevailing presence of military jets and helicopters that circulate in the sky in Too Hot in Tel Aviv, hovering over gay sexual acts, is also a sign of military force that ensures the safety of queers in Israel within the hostile environment of the Middle East.

The gay porn films made in Israel, and those made by Lucas in particular, are ipso facto cases of homonationalism. Lucas’ work has likewise been accused of ‘pinkwashing’ Israel, that is, as Sarah Schulman (2011) explains, ‘a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life' (A31). American journalist Max Blumenthal (2013) has described Lucas as ‘one of the world’s wealthiest gay porn producers' who ‘leveraged his fortune to found a company promoting gay tourism to Israel.’ According to Blumenthal, ‘featured two actors having sex inside a Palestinian village that was ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias in 1948’ while Lucas incorrectly claimed that ‘the village had been depopulated hundreds of years before.’ Agassi’s Israeli, macho, militarized image was, therefore, also formed within this context that links normative nationalism with queerness. In Lucas’ films, Israel is presented as a Western liberal democracy for the LGBT community, unlike the hostility of other Middle Eastern countries toward homosexuality.⁴

Performing shame

Contrary to Agassi’s Israeli, homonational, militarized, hypermasculine image in these porn films, Heymann’s documentary presents shame as the constitutive affective experience of his queer identity. ‘Shame,’ Jack Halberstam (2005) writes, is ‘a gendered form of sexual abjection: it belongs to the feminine, and when men find themselves “flooded” with shame, chances are they are being feminized in some way and against their will’ (226). Gay men’s reclamation of dominant masculinity is meant to compensate for their shameful feminization in childhood: their former abject status as sissy boys. Indeed, the film tells us that during his childhood, Agassi experienced cruel and painful situations of public shame-humiliation due to his gender and sexual otherness. According to his mother, he came out at a very young age. His classmates called him ‘homo,’ threatened him with a knife, and threw excrement at him because he was an effeminate boy. One day, she was rushed to the school to find him standing on a window ledge as the other children encouraged him to jump. The phrase shouted out by the children, ‘I dare you, queer,’ is the performative utterance that produced Agassi’s shamed identity. ‘They understood that I’m going to extremes,' he recalls painfully, ‘not because I wanted to, but because I wanted to escape.’ These words are spoken to the camera by Agassi and his mother as they are filmed sitting together on a pastoral beach in Greece – an image that contrasts with the description of the traumatic events – at the time of filming one of Lucas’ porn productions. Agassi’s exhibitionist Israeli, militarized, hypermasculinity as a gay porn star thus conceals and compensates for the experience of exclusion and shame-humiliation of the queer boy. Indeed, as Sedgewick (1993) notes, ‘shame and exhibitionism’ come from the ‘same glove’ (5). Furthermore, shame, Sedgewick argues, is essentially tied to enjoyment and interest in the other (7). As a queer child, Agassi expressed interest and desire to be seen, recognized, connected to, and accepted by his classmates. When he failed to elicit their positive interest, he was flooded with shame that constituted his subjectivity while at the same time putting that very subjectivity into crisis precisely because of the failure to form a connection. Shame, therefore, is a personal, isolating, and individuating experience while also being a form of communication, of reaching out – or as Sedgwick (2003) writes, shame makes a ‘double movement […] toward painful individuation, toward uncontrollable relationality’ (37).

Agassi cannot get rid of his sexual shame, but he attempts to rebuild the interpersonal connection to his young and humiliated self and transforms the shameful pain. He looks for hope (or desire) within failure, trying to reconstitute the connection violently broken in the past. The film shows home-videos and photos of Agassi as a child, where he is seen with his mother, older brother, and his father. In one of the photos, he is a teenager, seen wearing women’s clothing and a blond wig, make-up, and high-heel shoes, in a spectacular display of femininity in the family living room. ‘At age 15,’ he tells, ‘I was sure that I wanted to be a woman.’ In addition to the muscular, tough, militarized image of Israeli hypermasculinity, the older Agassi of the present also adopts a queer ‘feminine’ appearance that suggests exposure, vulnerability, and receptiveness: dressing for public events, he wears thongs that expose his buttocks, net stockings, garters, and stiletto heels that echo the photo from his childhood. Like this photo, he has also dyed his hair platinum blond – an act that led to him being fired immediately from the one of Lucas’ films. Lucas comments that ‘We are very specific about what we want. Jonathan would violate our rules and regulations all the time.’ Agassi has broken the rules by presenting a queer image that emphasizes gender performativity and gender crossing that does not adhere to the porn industry’s demand of a rough, Israeli, hypermasculine look. On a different occasion, he arrived to the set high on drugs, and was unable to ejaculate, and the production crew had to fake the semen, resulting in him not getting paid for his part in the film. Linda Williams (1999) argues that in hardcore pornography, the ‘the money shot’ (the male’s visible ejaculation) is ‘the visual evidence of the mechanical “truth” of bodily pleasure caught in involuntary spasm; the ultimate and uncontrollable – ultimate because uncontrollable – confession of sexual pleasure in the climax of orgasm’ (101). Agassi’s inability or refusal (in another scene he says that he did not feel attracted to the muscular and shaved male actors) to ejaculate violated the convention of pornographic realism and challenged the ‘natural’ and ‘authentic’ representation of Israeli macho masculinity and its sexual pleasure. Following events such as these, Agassi lost his status as a leading porn star and became a supporting actor at Lucas Entertainment.

Agassi thus demonstrates an exhibitionist enjoyment and performance of sexuality that is organized around shame and thus subverts the naturalized Israeli, militarized, masculine image of his gay star persona and thus its homonational logic. The identity-constituting affect of shame fuels his performative practice and shapes its terms. Performing shame, Agassi knowingly invites the humiliation and shameful sanctions placed upon him in Lucas’ porn productions and thus repeats the formative scene of childhood shame. His shame is, therefore, as Sedgewick (1993) notes, a ‘transformational shame,’ a performance, a form of communication, ‘a desire to reconstitute the interpersonal bridge’ broken between him and the rejected sissy boy (5).

Agassi reenacts the formative scene of childhood shame (his photo in women’s clothing) also in front of his family. In one scene, he exits his room dressed in minimal clothing, wearing a leather mask and harness, silk underwear and stockings, and high-heel boots in the style of designer Alexander McQueen, standing in front of his mother in the living room. ‘Is this pretty?’ he asks her. ‘It is, it’s gorgeous!’ the mother replies, but is quick to add, ‘It’s weird,' trying to gently persuade him to give up the look (‘You’re not in Berlin.') Agassi calls his sister and asks her too ‘Is this pretty?’ she looks from the side and says, ‘Wow! It’s really exposed!' She lets out a sigh, signifying her deep disappointment from her brother’s queer spectacle, and returns to her room. For the sister, Agassi’s exposed and ‘feminine’ look marks vulnerability and therefore evokes shame. Agassi’s queer performativity challenges the biologically determinist causal relations between anatomy, gender identity, and gender performance, thereby exposing gender as a practice of imitation rather than a natural essence. When his older brother suddenly enters the living room, Agassi quickly returns to his room as he shamefully hides his exposed buttocks with his hands. Agassi, though, does not relent, and returns to the living room, wanders around the familial public space in nonchalance, again and again encouraging his family members to react to his queer exhibition. He asks the brother ‘Is this pretty?’ and the brother answers: ‘Yes, it’s pretty, but … I’m sorry, it’s hard for me to see you this way, I love you as my brother but … ’. Agassi smiles and defiantly raising the heel of his boot toward his brother. In this scene, Agassi performatively reenacts his childhood shame, a shame that is both de-constituting and foundational of his queer identity. He repeats, time and again, the question ‘Is this pretty?’ self-consciously summoning the reaction of his family members, and by doing so he restages his desire for recognition, while risking failure or embarrassment, in order to ease the humiliation of the shameful childhood experience. He tries to continue the mutual gaze that has been disturbed in the past and that constitutes his subjectivity, while at the same time reenacting the loss of that gaze, because of his need for relief from the situation of social isolation created by shame. He performatively restages the scene of his childhood shame and transforms it to an empowering affirmation of his queer identity. He lovingly embraces his shameful young self, as Sedgewick describes, ‘both in spite of shame and, more remarkably, through it’ (8).

Family of shame

Shame appears at an age of three to seven months, right after the infant is able to identify his/her caregiver’s face. ‘That is the moment,’ Sedgewick writes, ‘when the circuit of mirroring expressions between the child’s face and the caregiver’s recognized face […] is broken: the moment when the adult face fails or refuses to play its part in the continuation of mutual gaze […] Shame floods into being as a moment, a disruptive moment, in a circuit of identity-constituting identificatory communication’ (5). After Agassi’s was born in New York, his mother suffered from post-partum depression, while his father was absent from home for most of the day. ‘You were alone in the crib. You were not hugged the way a newborn should be,’ admits the father in the film. Perhaps it is no coincidence then that Agassi’s apartment in Berlin is ‘flooded’ with many mirrors at which he stares and that reflect his image – a possible attempt to restore and reconstitute the form of primary narcissism, rehabilitate and maintain the continuity of the circuit of mirroring expression that was disrupted during his childhood. At a later age, Agassi and his siblings would film themselves and send their father videos when he moved to Berlin, but the latter never bothered to answer them. ‘My father,’ says Agassi, ‘was a red dot in the camera.’ The adult Agassi’s confessions to the camera can therefore be read as a search for a refused response from that same vanishing ‘red dot’ marking the father. Agassi tells the story of how during one of his visits to Berlin, when he was eleven years old, his father tried to force him into having sex with his girlfriend and when Agassi refused, his father mocked him by asking ‘Are you gay or what?’ The film reveals an old photograph where Agassi is seen with his father’s girlfriend, her face blurred, kissing – visible evidence of the abuse and sexual humiliation he experienced in the past as a gay teenager. But it was also the very attempt to communicate with the father who would not respond or, instead of supporting his son, mocked him like his classmates, that could flood Agassi with shame. This was perhaps similar to situation in which

one is suddenly looked at by one who is strange, or … one wishes to look at or commune with another person but suddenly cannot because he is strange, or one expected him to be familiar but he suddenly appears unfamiliar, or one started to smile but found one was smiling at a stranger. (Tomkins qtd. in Sedgwick 2003, 35)

In one of the episodes, Agassi initiates a meeting with his estranged father in his Berlin apartment, a meeting he is very excited about. He cleans and organizes his living room, changes his clothes, tries to look as normative as possible. Despite Agassi’s need to ease his shameful self-identity, he does not focus during the conversation with his father on his childhood shame. Instead, he is interested to know more about his father’s treatment of his mother and the circumstances of their divorce. The father tells him of his mother who conceived unexpectedly and suffered from depression because she wanted a girl instead of a boy. That is, his father not only blames his mother but also Agassi for not being born in the correct and desired gender. The shame that floods Agassi is not only over what he has done, but also, and mostly, for who he is – a gay man. Indeed, ‘shame,’ Sedgwick suggests, ‘is a bad feeling attaching to what one is’ (12). Later in the film, his mother will reveal the reasons for her depression over a skype conversation with her son: ‘I was depressed because I was neglected in New York. I suffered every day and cried all day and I had no one to talk to.’ Liz Constable (2004) claims that ‘being ashamed for women has more to do with the absence of response from others than with Sartre’s descriptions of penetrating shaming gazes' (677). Shame was cast upon Agassi’s mother by the fact of her husband’s disavowal of her very existence. Upon hearing her painful story, Agassi breaks down in a heartfelt scene of weeping.

Agassi does not cry because his father lied to him, as he testifies in the film, misinterpreting his own reaction. He cries because he – for whom humiliation-shame is a constituting affective experience – is flooded with shame due to his relation to the pain, stigma, weakness, guilt, and bad treatment that the mother suffered from his father. Indeed, shame, Sedgwick notes, is a contagious affect:

the way bad treatment of someone else, someone else’s embarrassment, stigma, debility, blame or pain, seemingly having nothing to do with me, can so readily flood me – assuming that I’m a shame-prone person – with this sensation whose very suffusiveness seems to delineate my precise, individual outlines in the most isolating way imaginable. (14)

Agassi connects to his mother’s abandonment, isolation and loneliness that led to her experience of shame and that shaped her subjectivity. He acknowledges that special connection between them through their shared vulnerability to shame.

Unlike the stereotype of the disapproving and judgmental mother of the gay man who blames her son for his ‘choices,’ Agassi’s mother is sensitive, understanding and accepting, and always speaks to her son in a soft, loving tone, embracing his vulnerability. The relationship between them is close, open, and warm: he asks that she send postcards in his name to his fans; he proudly shows her his porn films (even though she cannot watch the hard-core scenes) and his daring outfits. She admires him (‘Jonathan Agassi, superstar,’ she says) and asks only that he buy himself a warm coat – not to hide his shame but to protect him from the violence of a homophobic society. He takes her on vacation to Greece, they lie on the beach, hugging, in what may appear to some viewers as an ‘odd behavior,’ non-normative mother-son relationship, exhibitionist, embarrassing, and therefore shameful. However, on the same beach, they recall the pain of Agassi as a child. And they cry. Agassi and his mother courageously present and expose to camera a desire to communicate while taking the risk that their self-display and exhibitionist performance of their shame will meet the refusing and disapproving gaze of the viewer, but in this way, they also constitute their own identity. The question of their identity, therefore, is based on their relation to others.

Queer ethics in shame

In Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life, the shame of the social actors is spectacularly constituted. They knowingly look at the camera, the filmmaker, and the viewers. Agassi especially performs his shame when he allows Heymann’s camera to film – also filming himself – during almost every intimate moment in his life, including the use of hard drugs, injection of stimulants into his penis that enable a prolonged erection, and sexual acts that he performs with his clients as an escort. Contrary to the guilt that retains in the individual’s consciousness, shame requires an act of knowledge of being seen by another. That is, shame requires a relationality (Crimp 2009). Agassi’s behavior would not be shameful if he lacked an audience. It would then be a private action performed by him and for himself alone and for which he may, or may not, feel guilty. Through his knowledge that he is seen – through his relation to his viewers (his fans, Heymann, or the film’s viewers) – his shame is created.

Throughout his work, Heymann does not observe the events and the social actors from a distance but engages in an interactive (participatory, conversational, interrogative) fashion with them (Nichols 1991). In Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life, he hands over the camera to Agassi in order for him to film his shame. At the same time, Heymann’s own camera does not look away from Agassi, does not blink, even in scenes that are troubling and hard to watch, allowing him to perform his shame. Heymann is present with Agassi in almost every moment in the film, but unlike his previous documentaries, he decides not to interfere in most cases and not make himself visible in the documentary space.

In two scenes in the film, Agassi is filmed experiencing a drug-fueled meltdown: the first takes place at his friend Christo’s apartment. Heymann stops the interview, and we hear him ask Agassi if he is alright. Christo tells Heymann that these situations occur often when Agassi talks about his wounded history, especially about his father. Christo lifts Agassi like a baby and lays him gently on the bed. The second scene, toward the end of film, is even more extreme: Agassi collapses in broad daylight and lies helplessly on a car hood of one of the cars parking on a street in Berlin. This shocking scene raises fundamental ethical questions of documentary filmmaking (Nichols 77): At what stage does the filmmaker’s moral obligation to the subject collide with the act of documentation itself? Is there a moment in which the filmmaker needs to stop filming? I suggest that Heymann is aware of these ethical questions. He does not stop filming and, for the first time in the film, he enters the documentary space, asks Agassi if he wants water, and helps him get up and return to his apartment. Heymann does not film these events of abjection and debasement from a distance and does not establish hierarchical relationships between himself and the subject. Instead, he moves closer with his camera, and even enters the frame in order to assist Agassi. Heymann acknowledges that he participates in the film, together with the subject, in a power dynamic of documentary filmmaking. He reflexively foregrounds and turns the viewer’s attention to the intimate interaction between the filmmaker and the social actor and directly refers to issues concerning the ethical responsibility of a filmmaker toward the subject.

Heymann’s decisions in the film point to his awareness of these ethical questions not only as a documentary filmmaker but also as a gay man. ‘[I]mages ethics discourses,’ Janet Walker and Diane Waldman (1999) argue, ‘tend to neglect documentaries initiated jointly by subjects and filmmakers who come, very often, from the same milieu and who wish to articulate in documentary form their shard position in the world’ (15). In his documentaries, Heymann has often exposed his own gay shame: his vulnerability and difficulties with his sexual identity and coming out to his family and his social surrounding, and his struggle as a gay man with the homophobia of Israeli society and nationalism at large. Thus, Heymann, as a shame-prone-person, as one for whom shame is also identity constituting, expresses solidarity – certainly not pity – with Agassi; and on the grounds of a shared experience of abjection he communicates with the other, rallies for him, offering him queer dignity or what Michael Warner (2000) termed ‘queer ethics of dignity in shame’ (37). Warner critiques the attempts of contemporary gay community for normalization and assimilation into heteronormative consensus. He calls for a politics of shame that deals with shameful relations and with the memory of shame as constitutive of queer identity and as a basis of queer ethics.

Unlike the homonormative and homonational sexual politics of LGBT community in Israel that is guided by a progressive trajectory from shame to pride, Heymann’s film calls for a politics of shame. In his documentaries, Heymann shows us that any attempt to remove the stigmas from gay and lesbian identities casts shame on groups or individuals who cannot or are not interested in joining the Israeli national consensus and star in his films – sex workers, drug addicts, drag queens, immigrants workers, non-Jewish foreigners, queer boys – all of whom do not belong to the same exclusive group comprised mostly of Jewish gay men and women who were able to adjust themselves to the normative model of citizenship. Those who cannot or do not wish to remove the shame were forced to pay the price of the shame of others that was disavowed, only to find themselves excluded not only from heterosexual society but also from the gay community itself. All those marginalized, shamed, socially exposed and vulnerable groups or individuals of Israeli society star in Heymann’s documentaries. Heymann recognizes the shared experience of being rejected and despised in a world of false moralistic norms by his very choice to deal in his cinema, through the story of Jonathan Agassi and his likes, with the experience of shame. In this film, shame becomes a form of sociability, what Douglas Crimp (2009) calls ‘collectives of the shamed’ (72) or as Warner writes, the ‘acknowledgement of all that is most abject and least respectable in oneself’ (35).

Conclusion

In Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life, Heymann’s documentary ethics – inserting himself into the frame and handing over the camera to Agassi – are thus not only an ethical stance in relation to power imbalances in filmmaking, but also a short-circuiting of visual regimes of gay shame and its denial. They are part of a production of queer sociability based on the relation to others. It is a film about and by shamed and vulnerable people that are constituted in and by relations. It asks us to embrace our exposure and openness and recognize that we are all vulnerable subjects who depend on the other in the political and ethical sense. It shows us that the vulnerability of the affective experience of shame plays a central role in our relationship to our bodies and to the bodies of others around us, including the body of the documentary filmmaker himself. In this sense, Jonathan Agassi did indeed save Heymann’s life as well.

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Raz Yosef

Raz Yosef is a professor of cinema studies at the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University, Israel. He is the author of Beyond Flesh: Queer Masculinities and Nationalism in Israeli Cinema (2004), The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema (2011), Contemporary Israeli Cinema: Trauma, Ethics and Temporality (2022), and the co-editor of Just Images: Ethics and the Cinematic (2011) and Deeper than Oblivion: Trauma and Memory in Israeli Cinema (2013). His work on gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, trauma and memory in Israeli film culture has appeared in GLQ, Third Text, Framework, Shofar, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Camera Obscura, Feminist Media Studies, Middle East Critique, Cinema Journal, and Signs.

Notes

1 On first-person documentaries see, for example, Michael Renov (2004); Alisa S. Lebow (2008); Shmulik Duvdevani (2010); Alisa S. Lebow (2012).

2 The film can also be understood within gay documentaries transition that employ, as Thomas Waugh (2011) argues, ‘performance-based techniques [that] included inflections of standard interviewing, editing, and expert testimony styles; “coming out” variations of consciousness-raising formats borrowed from women’s movement documentaries; and expressive elements that were more theatrical than standard documentary idiom […] such as dramatization; improvisatory role playing and reconstruction; statements and monologues based on preparation and rehearsal; and nonverbal performances of music, dance, gesture and corporal moment, including those of an erotic and diaristic nature’ (222). See also Holmlund and Fuchs (1997).

3 Men of Israel, homepage, Lucas Entertainment, www.menofisraelxxx.com.

4 Lucas also made the documentary Undressing Israel: Gay Men in The Promised Land (Michael Lucas and Yariv Mozer 2012). The film leaves no doubt as to the legality of homosexuality in Israel and repeatedly compares gay rights in Israel with their poor state in other Middle Eastern countries. Lucas, ostentatiously wearing a Star of David pendant, meets a gym trainer who explains that he was out of the closet during his military service, gay rights activists, a gay couple who had children through surrogacy, and attends the Tel Aviv Pride Parade and a gay wedding. In Undressing Israel, the future promised by the West has already happened in the Israeli utopia. Homonormativity and homonationalism have already been achieved and it is the West that needs to correct its misperceptions about Israel and catch up with it in terms of progressive rights.